Graphics are visual presentations on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, computer screen, paper, or stone to brand, inform, illustrate, or entertain. Examples of graphics include photographs, drawings, line art, graphs, diagrams, typography, numbers, symbols, geometric designs, maps, engineering drawings, or other images. Graphics can combine text, illustration, and color. Graphic design can include deliberate selection, creation, or arrangement of typography alone, as in a brochure, flier, poster, web site, or book without any other element.
Computer graphics sometimes can refer to representation and manipulation of image data by a computer, various technologies that can be used to create and manipulate images, images that are produced, digital synthesizing and manipulating of visual content, and/or many other things. Computers and computer-generated images touch many aspects of daily life. Computer imagery is found on television, in newspapers, in weather reports, in medical investigation and surgical procedures, as well as many other areas. Many powerful tools have been developed to visualize data. Computer generated imagery can be categorized into several different types: 2D, 3D, and animated graphics. As technology has improved, 3D computer graphics have become more common, but 2D computer graphics are still widely used. Computer graphics has emerged as a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Over the past decade, other specialized fields have been developed like information visualization, and scientific visualization more concerned with “the visualization of three dimensional phenomena (architectural, meteorological, medical, biological, etc.), where the emphasis is on realistic renderings of volumes, surfaces, illumination sources, and so forth, perhaps with a dynamic (time) component.”
Computer graphics typically include various visual textures. An ability to model such visual texture is important in any computer graphics modeling system. The advent of digital photography has made natural images an important source for textures. Numerous texture synthesis techniques have been developed to generate arbitrarily large textures to be mapped onto digital models. However, texture synthesis methods require an input image that contains a single texture, called an exemplar. Artists must often tediously transform or assist in transforming the relevant parts of a natural image to obtain an exemplar.
Some conventional systems have attempted to improve an existing exemplar. These systems include inverse texture synthesis systems that start with globally varying texture image and accompanying control map and produce a more compact exemplar. However, these systems do not extract an exemplar from an unconstrained natural image. Other known systems have dealt with extracting textures from images and removal of the effects of non-planar and affine transformed surfaces. However, such systems require a large amount of user input to locate the desired textures.
Thus, conventional techniques have not been able to succeed in obtaining texture exemplars with desired speed, simplicity and accuracy. As such, there is a need for better way for obtaining texture exemplars that is capable of automatically, quickly, and accurately extracting desired texture from an image based on a simple user's input.